Reading Chekhov

As a literary pilgrimage this one, of course, was even more absurd than the trip to Oreanda. Anna's first-class compartment could not have been anything like the one the fat young man and I occupied, about which there was nothing first-class. Its furnishings were cheap and ugly relics of the Soviet period. The food, served in plastic containers, was gray and inedible. And yet there was a feeling here of something comfortable and familiar. Outside it was raw and wet; here it was warm and cozy. My seat-a high, narrow banquette equipped with a mattress covered with a printed cloth, and a plump large pillow-was agreeable to curl up on. It resembled the high bed on which the engineer Asorin naps, in the warm, cozy house of Bragin, after his transformative dinner. In his stories, Chekhov liked to contrast the harsh weather of God's world with the kindlier climate of man's shelters from it. He liked to bring characters out of blizzards and rain storms into warm, snug interiors. In "Gooseberries," Burkin, a schoolteacher, and Ivan Ivanovitch, a veterinarian, have got caught in a downpour while out walking, and arrive drenched and muddy and cross at the house of a landowner named Alehin, who lives alone and welcomes them gladly. After bathing, "when the lamp was lighted in the big drawing-room upstairs, and Burkin and Ivan Ivanovitch, attired in silk dressing gowns and warm slippers, were sitting in armchairs; and… [the servant] lovely Pelagea, stepping noiselessly on the carpet and smiling softly, handed tea and jam on a tray," Ivan Ivanovitch tells the story that gives "Gooseberries" its name. "Gooseberries" is the second in a series of three loosely connected stories-within-stories (the outer stories have the same main characters) that Chekhov wrote in the summer of 1898-stories, as it develops, that do not celebrate the hearth but, on the contrary, constitute a three-part parable about the perils of staying warm and safe, and thereby missing what is worthwhile in life, if not life itself. In each instance the pleasant outer story of safe refuge has an ironic relationship to a disturbing inner story of wasted life. Chekhov hated to be cold and loved to be warm, but he knew that the payoff was in the cold. This is why he went to Sakhalin. This is why when he was in lush, semitropical Yalta he longed for the austere, icy Moscow spring.

In the first story of the series, "The Man in a Case," Burkin tells Ivan Ivanovitch-they have found shelter in a barn after a day of hunting-the tragicomic tale of a Greek teacher named Byelikov, who "displayed a constant and insurmountable impulse to wrap himself in a covering, to make himself, so to speak, a case which would isolate him and protect him from external influences. Reality irritated him, frightened him, kept him in continual agitation, and, perhaps to justify his timidity, his aversion for the actual, he always praised the past and what had never existed; and even the classical languages which he taught were in reality for him galoshes and umbrellas in which he sheltered himself from real life." When a bit of actuality-a small loss of face-penetrates his defenses, Byelikov cannot survive it. He takes to his bed and dies within a month.